AmLaw Early Reports; Lawyer Mental Health; Chat GPT
AmLaw Early Reports
The American Lawyer recently offered a preview of results to be published in their annual AmLaw 100 and AmLaw 200 surveys in April and May (The Tumult in the AmLaw 200 Ranks Will Create Lasting Lessons), Christine Simmons, 3/2/23, Law.com Barometer). A few preliminary patterns noted by the article:
“Law firms had wildly disparate financial performances in 2022, from double digit growth in revenue to double digit drops in profits.”
Some of the firms with the fastest headcount or revenue growth in recent years saw dips in revenue or profit, and/or implemented layoffs.
“New York law firms with historic ties to big investment banks and large capital markets transactions also had big profit declines.”
Some of the firms with the best financial growth in 2022 were outside of the AmLaw 50 and “grew market share by making acquisitions and investing in practice areas that generally saw steady demand.”
So far, the American Lawyer has published a number of “Early Reports,” discussing the 2022 financials of individual law firms. They will continue to publish Early Reports up through the release of the AmLaw 100 and 200 surveys.
Mental Health
Patrick Krill and the U. of Minnesota Dept. of Psychiatry recently published a paper identifying predictors of suicidal ideation among lawyers “Krill Paper” (Stressed, Lonely, and Overcommitted: Predictors of Lawyer Suicide Risk, Patrick Krill et al., Healthcare 2023, 11(4), 536). Stress is by far the biggest predictor; lawyers with high levels of perceived stress are 22 times more likely to experience suicidal thoughts than those with low levels of perceived stress (Krill Paper). This finding is consistent with a study examining data from the National Violent Death Reporting System that found that “job problems” were 91% more likely to be a contributing factor in lawyer suicides than in suicides in the general population (When Our Stress Becomes Dangerous, Patrick Krill, 3/1/23, The American Lawyer). In addition to stress, other predictors of suicidal ideation identified in the Krill Paper are:
loneliness (those screened as “lonely” are 2.8 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than those screened as “not lonely”),
gender (men are 2 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than women),
a prior mental health diagnosis (those with a prior diagnosis are 1.8 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than those without), and
“high work overcommitment” (those with “high work overcommitment” were 2.2 times more likely to experience suicidal ideation than those with “low work overcommitment”).
Stress may be a particularly difficult problem to address in post-pandemic law practice. First, stress may be inherent in the profession; a recent analysis by the Washington Post of survey data collected between 2010 and 2021 by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that lawyers were the most stressed of any occupation (Law is the Most Stressful Profession, Newspaper’s Analysis Finds, Debra Cassens Weiss, 1/24/23, ABA Journal). Second, Doctor Larry Richard, an expert on the psychology of lawyer behavior and founder of the LawyerBrain, notes that the open-ended stressors of the Covid pandemic diminished nearly everyone’s ability to handle workplace stressors by altering the brain’s fight-or-flight response. Through near constant use during the pandemic, that circuit is now more easily activated, and as a result people may become hyper-reactive to smaller, everyday stressors; relatedly, “intellectual horsepower” may have been degraded because more bandwidth is now dedicated to this threat circuit (The Lawyers Are Not Alright, 1/30/23, The American Lawyer).
Krill views the increase in stress resilience offerings by law firms as beneficial half-measures, addressing only “the consequences of stress rather than mitigating the causes” (Highly Stressed Lawyers 22 Times More Likely to Consider Suicide, Study Finds “Highly Stressed,” Dan Roe, 2/13/23, The American Lawyer). To mitigate, Krill suggests in part that firms conduct regular work-life boundary audits to ensure manageable workloads (Highly Stressed).
Chat GPT
Firms are considering how to take advantage of ChatGPT and other generative AI solutions. In a perfect world, ChatGPT could handle lower-level work, freeing up attorneys to do higher-level (higher fee-earning) work. However, some commentators question whether junior associate development might be stunted by outsourcing lower-level tasks through which associates have traditionally familiarized themselves with relevant documents, clients, and industries. Additionally, firms may need to grapple with how to keep associates busy and/or profitable in the absence of this work.
As Law.com’s Atif Ludi noted, there are several other concerns with generative AI: 1) the accuracy of information; 2) the potential release of sensitive information into the web through queries; 3) the possibility of inadvertently downloading ransomware onto firm devices (ChatGPT, Friend or Foe?, Atif Ludi, 2/27/23, Law.com Compass). ChatGPT’s successor GPT-4 may address these initial concerns in part. According to a press release on Tuesday, GPT-4 passed both the multiple choice and the written portions of the Uniform Bar Exam and exceeded the average score of human test-takers. Further, “[c]lient data is never used to train the models, and law firms retain complete control over their data” (GPT-4 Is Here. Casetext’s CoCounsel Already Brought It to Legal, Stephanie Wilkins, 3/14/23, Corporate Counsel, quoting Casetext’s Chief Technology Officer Dr. Ryan Walker).
Casetext gave early access to GPT-4 to several Fortune 50 companies and firms in the AmLaw 50 through its CoCounsel product. According to the press release, DLA Piper has been using CoCounsel since September 2022; DLA Piper’s Americas Chair Frank Ryan noted that GPT-4 is “changing how the law is practiced by automating critical, time-intensive tasks and freeing our lawyers to focus on the most impactful aspects of practice.”
